Volume.

Everyone’s incentivised to care about it.

Exchanges make money on volume. Projects get ranked by it. Aggregators publish information about it. Investors glance at it and assume something’s happening. But that shared obsession creates a trap.

Founders get dragged into chasing numbers that don’t reflect real activity, and worse, start paying people to generate them. That’s when things go sideways. And most don’t realise how badly it can end until they’re stuck in the mess.

Here’s what actually happens, what we’ve seen, and how we handle it differently.

Why everyone starts chasing volume

When you launch a token, there are two metrics everyone sees straight away, price and volume. They’re visible, ranked, and simple. If the price is going up and the volume’s high, people assume the project’s doing well.

It all comes back to incentives. Exchanges charge fees based on trading volume. So they want volume, more of it, all the time. It makes them more money and makes the venue look healthy. Busy exchange, high volume, more traders.

Token teams want volume too. Volume gets you attention on aggregators like CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap. It puts you in ‘trending’ sections on the website, top gainer lists, daily movers. Attention drives demand. Demand drives price. Price going up makes your project look strong... and so the feedback loop forms.

Everyone’s aligned on driving volume. Exchanges, token teams, sometimes even investors. So it becomes the target. It becomes the KPI.

That’s where things start to go wrong.

When market makers start faking it

We’ve had conversations where projects ask directly, “Can you generate volume?”

Some market makers say yes. They promise it upfront. And then they deliver it, but not in a way that’s real.

The most obvious version is wash trading. They trade against themselves on one or more venues to pump the numbers. Cycling orders between accounts, keeping the price steady, making it look active. Sometimes they burn through some of the mm fees to make it happen. If they’re getting paid enough, they don’t mind. The token ranks higher, the exchange sees more activity, everyone’s happy, on paper.

Some go even further. They offer “price management.” What they really mean is price manipulation. Hold the level. Walk the price up. Push it during peak hours.

In traditional finance, that’s market abuse 101. You don’t interfere with price discovery. You don’t create a false market. You don’t mislead traders into thinking demand exists when it doesn’t.

If a market maker guarantees volume or guarantees price movement, that’s a red flag. You’re creating a false impression. You’re inducing people to trade based on misleading information. That’s what gets picked up by regulators.

We’ve seen projects get dragged into legal messes because of it. Tokens delisted. MMs investigated and even prosecuted by the SEC.

What a proper market maker actually does

When someone asks us, “Can you drive volume?”, the answer is no. What we can do is improve the liquidity environment so volume is more likely to happen naturally.

We set KPIs around passive liquidity. That means how much we’ll post in the book, on both sides, and how close we’ll sit to top of book. For example, $50,000 within 50 basis points, $100,000 within 2 percent.

That order depth means when someone genuinely wants to buy or sell, there’s liquidity there to interact with. They don’t suffer 5 percent slippage just to get filled. That’s what good looks like. It doesn’t guarantee volume, but it makes helps make good volume more likely, because the trading experience is better.

We also help teams understand the right metrics. What’s the slippage on a $100k clip when we’re in the book versus when we’re not? What does execution look like during volatility? Is pricing efficient across venues?

We’ve spent years thinking about trading costs and execution quality. That’s the part we focus on. The conditions that allow real trading to happen.

Founders need to stop outsourcing their ethics

We’ve seen the damage this causes. We’ve seen projects lose listings, get investigated, or blow up because they handed control of their token to the wrong people.

And it usually starts with pressure. Pressure from exchanges to hit certain volume numbers to maintain their listing. Pressure from investors to show progress. Pressure from the team themselves to get things moving.

So they go out and look for someone who’ll hit the targets. And they find them. And those people wash trade, or spoof, or manipulate price, and the founders are oblivious.

We met someone recently who described themselves as doing “numbers marketing.” Asked what that meant. They said, “We can get you Twitter followers, wallets, volume, whatever number you need.” That culture’s everywhere. Especially for crypto-native teams who’ve never operated under a regulator or had compliance training. I get how a group of young engineers might think, “Of course I can generate volume. Who cares?” They might’ve already bought fake followers. Why not add some fake volume?

But you have to ask: are you creating a false impression? If yes, then should you be doing it?

It’s your token. Your project. Your baby. You’re responsible for what happens to it. Don’t hand it over to someone who’s going to wreck it for short-term optics.